> According to Billy Wilder, "Ball of Fire was an idea that I brought with me from Germany. It was written in German, in Berlin, before Hitler. It was better in German. The idea of the respected professors who lived life only in their books was more of a German idea. You know, 'Herr Doktor Professor.'" Wilder's original story evolved into "From A to Z," the tale of a professor who hires a burlesque queen to teach him slang. On his arrival in the U.S., Wilder had Americanized the story with the help of writer Thomas Monroe and sold it to MGM. Studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn originally considered calling the film either Blonde Blitzkrieg or The Professor and the Burlesque Queen but finally settled on Ball of Fire. He also liked the idea of Gary Cooper as a shy romantic lead, so Goldwyn put Wilder and Charles Brackett to work on the screenplay, which sent the screenwriters to various places around Los Angeles -- the drugstore across from Hollywood High School, a burlesque house, a pool room and a racetrack -- to research slang. They also had great fun shaping the characters of Cooper's academic colleagues around the seven dwarfs as presented in the Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

> To help audience members connect the seven elderly professors with the seven dwarfs from Walt Disney's movie, the publicity department posed a portrait of the seven actors seated in front of a poster for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with each in the same position as the dwarf he represented: S.Z. Sakall - Dopey; Leonid Kinskey - Sneezy; Richard Haydn - Bashful; Henry Travers - Sleepy; Aubrey Mather - Happy; Tully Marshall - Grumpy; and Oskar Homolka - Doc.

> In 1948, Goldwyn produced a musical remake with Hawks directing under the title A Song Is Born. Danny Kaye took over the Gary Cooper role, with Virginia Mayo as Sugarpuss. Mary Field, who played Kaye's fiancée, was the only member of the original cast to return for the re-make. The film had problems from the start. Kaye was temporarily separated from his wife and seeing a psychiatrist twice a day which left him, according to Hawks, "as funny as a crutch." Mayo was hampered by the fact that Goldwyn forced her to view the original repeatedly and play her role exactly as Stanwyck had. A Song Is Born got some of the worst reviews of Goldwyn's career.